Clothes

I’m not sure about fashion but I do like clothes. I like the clothes actors wear in French films: Michel Piccoli in Le Mepris or Jean Paul Belmondo in Pierrot Le Fou. Jean-Luc Godard’s actors. It’s something about how he likes to see things, and it must be something about how he likes to see himself. I can barely watch a scene from those films without feeling myself on the edge of something extraordinary. Bridgette Bardot; Anna Karina. The island in Le Mepris. The garden around Jack Palance’s house. The studio where Paul, Camille and Jeremy watch Fritz Lang’s Odyssey. The room with Sam Fuller in Pierrot Le Fou. All of the sea and the sky around Marianne and Ferdinand.When I choose a shirt, or a tie, or a pair of trousers I’m not as much in touch with anything you’d usually call contemporary, apart from perhaps the shape of me they are about to enclose, as whatever’s hung around in me from films like those. I feel it in the cuffs, or the crease, or the knot. I see it in my shoes. If these things look good or attractive I imagine it’s because they fit, and it’s a fit not to the label but to something in me, which fits with something I’ve found in films and other places: Mozart’s 23rd Piano ConcertoSeventeen Seconds, The Aspern Papers, A World of Love, Flush, Scaramouche, Blow Up, Eden and the the Parks of South London. These things seem to synchronize and when I feel that synchronicity I’m reminded of myself.I like to be well-dressed and for that to happen I like to think of who’s dressing me. I largely wear Godard, I suppose. Maybe next season it’ll be James, and at various times I can remember it being Dylan, Smith, Holmes, and Banshee.